as best as i can tell microsoft/nvidia are in some kind of conspiracy to not allow a full screen dos prompt in windows vista/7 (from now on we will refer only to win7) here are some facts: since vista, one can not have a full screen dos prompt (ie: alt/enter) the same goes for win7 which (more or less) is a "fixed" vista. it is a driver issue (i have a nvidia gpu) since if you search the nvidia forums and dig deep you will come across an official suggestion that suggests installing the xp dirvers to be able to use fullscreen dos prompt. you wouldn't normally want to, but as a test i did do just that, and it sure works. proof that it's possible. so it's because of the new driver (WDM) structure. i also make sure to be logged in as admin and that the dos prompt itself is run as admin, which it is as you can see it at the top. furthermore, the dosbox emulation program from soundforge is capable of switching to a fullscreen dos mode. (this of course would be ace, except since it emulates dos, i can not run ztree this way.) stretching the dos prompt window is NOT what i want. it still has the frame and does not look proper. i use ztree and i really, really want a proper fullscreen dos prompt. so now i came here and ask. is there a program that lets me force a proper full screen dos prompt? the only thing i have not tried is the 4dos (or whatever it's called now) program that may open a proper full dos prompt in which i could then load ztree.
I don't think Windows 7 allows you to have DOS in a full screen..... I miss the old full screen DOS windows
what?? i just posted that it IS technically possible. that's the whole point. dosbox can do it and so can the xp drivers. it is an artificial restriction placed by the assholes @nvidia
I don't think it's fair to blame nVidia for this. The restriction is within the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM). This type of display driver is different from the ones used in XP, and none of them does allow fullscreen CMD windows as far as I know. I researched this during the Vista times, as I too miss the fullscreen CMD. The only solution I found then was to install an XP driver for the video card. This will, of course, break the DWM (Aero etc).
here are the screenshots. sorry, urie, but that's stretching, as i already mentioned and is not full screen window. and i did say it is possible as proven by installing xp drivers or even dosbox emulator. it IS a conspiracy of sorts. i will keep looking but don't hold much hope. i guess i'm just gonna have to keep using xp for most daily things, and boot into win7 (and any future o/s) to play games and do specific things that use more than 3.5gb ram, etc....
Do you guys really need a DOS box specifically (for compatibility reasons), or just a large command line window? If the latter is the case, I wonder why you don't use cygwin and/or mintty... you get a decent shell interpreter and fullscreen support. If you really need a true windows command prompt window, you're better off with Console2 (which you can get on sourceforge.net/projects/console/ .) MinTTY can be installed by itself (get it on code.google.com/p/mintty/ ) or via cygwin setup (get cygwin on cygwin.com/ .) PS: Since I only have 2 posts, the forum wouldn't let me post links so you'll only see text, sorry...
thanks for your input, i tried console2, and even before trying to see if i could make it full screen (because by default it's only a small window) i ran ztree and it did not load, so even if i'll be able to make if full screen it doesn't matter since ztree does not seem to work with it. i also installed the latest cygwin and that too does not work in full screen mode. as far as i can tell it still actually uses the win7 dos prompt for it's own use. i thought it may have it's own console or such. unless i'm missing something it's back to the drawing board. i might have to see if the guys who do dosbox have a forum or such....
I know for the default command prompt in Windows 7 they restrict you to an 80 character (or whatever it is exactly) width, I have no idea why though.
It's been a while since I've been here, but... in case this is still relevant, yes, you were missing something: when you're using cygwin, at the installation screen search for mintty and install that as well: when you're done, a new program group will be created in the start menu sporting "mintty"... launch it, and you'll get a terminal shell (usually the shell should be bash I think) where you can press Alt+Enter and get a fullscreen terminal session. ... if you're into ztree, you might want to install midnight commander as well (short "mc" - look for it at the cygwin package installation screen as well), launch it with "mc" and be surprised... ;-) Enjoy!
i use this reg entry to make cmd a little better... I suppose use at your own risk, but worst case scenario is your CMD will be a little bit better Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console] "HistoryBufferSize"=dword:00000064 "QuickEdit"=dword:00000001 "ScreenBufferSize"=dword:050c0070 "WindowSize"=dword:00300070 "FaceName"="Terminal"
of course i'm still interested, but there's no real hope of getting a proper full screen dos prompt in vista/win7 - especially with the correct font size. @HALIKUS i tried the change and see no difference. maybe the prompt window is longer? ah, unless i'm mistaken all that reg edit does is what you can manually enter into the properties settings anyway. :-(